


Soft Brutalities

by icarus_chained



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Courage, Fear, Friendship, Gen, Violence, connection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-07
Updated: 2012-09-07
Packaged: 2017-11-13 18:30:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/506435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were times Reese wondered if Finch understood the violence of the man he'd invited to join his crusade.</p><p>Small ficlet, set relatively early on, I think.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soft Brutalities

The first moment Finch had been real to him, a real man and not simply some rich paranoiac, it had been in a hotel room with Finch's throat beneath his arm, the smaller man's pulse fluttering desperately next to his skin. Fear and violence twisting and snarling beneath his skin, listening to the echoes of a woman's death, watching the pained, desperate honesty in the other man's eyes. The first moment the man had seemed human, it had been with Reese's violent hands on him, and pain in his eyes. 

There were times Reese wondered if Finch understood, truly _understood_ , the violence of the man he'd invited to join his crusade. If he knew how genuinely close he'd been to death, and how much that death still walked casually at his side, invited close with that bizarre mix of fear and caution and courage that made Finch so fascinating.

He couldn't, Reese thought, watching the other man limp stiffly past him, watching Finch flash him a faint, disgruntled look for failing to move out of the way fast enough. Finch couldn't possibly understand, couldn't _know_ , on a base, visceral level, or he would not act the way he did. 

Because for all the man was cautious to the point of true paranoia, for all that he built walls in shifting layers around himself, defenses against fears Reese wasn't always sure he understood, still there was nothing that would prevent Finch's death at Reese's hands. Nothing to stop a violent man, who they both knew had been fully ready to die when Finch found him, from holding that panicked pulse once more under his hand, and pressing down until it stopped. Nothing to suggest the memory of that first, visceral encounter.

What there _was_ , was a strange sense of ... responsibility? In Finch's eyes. A sense, an instinct, that whispered that those walls the man built, walls laid out around and between them, were as much to protect _him_ as they were to protect Finch. Watching the man rest his fingers over names threaded to hollow numbers, watching the stiffness in that damaged spine, Reese got the bizarre impression that Finch, with his names and his numbers and his eyes full of secret fears, honestly believed it his right and his responsibility to protect the predator he'd invited through his door.

This, for a man who'd made a living slipping soft inside people's lives, the better to kill them when he was done. For a man who'd only seen Finch as human when his throat was pinned beneath a savage arm, and his pain ripped up and thrust violently between them. For a man whose violence rested a calm pace away from his damaged form, while they sat alone among his secrets.

"Don't you know?" his thoughts whispered, with every move calculated to remind Finch of his danger, his capability, the things he'd done in the black places of his past. "Don't you _understand_?" they hissed, with every quiet brutality he held in Finch's face.

And there were moments, when Finch looked at him, when he met those tired eyes with all their secrets ... where he thought Finch did. Where he thought something in Finch saw the question, understood it, and answered it, stiff and braced and with that strange mix of fear and courage that let him walk into a hotel room alone with the echoes of death. "Yes," that soft thing said. "Yes, I know."

It was those moments where Finch began to seem more than human, to Reese. It was those moments when Finch began to seem ... _necessary_.


End file.
